Tag: Bees wax

After the beeswax fiasco of 2017, I needed a new ironing board cover. But even before that, my ironing board was becoming rather flat in the middle. It needed to be mended. Rather than toss the entire board, I deconstructed the cover and replaced the unusable piece. The end result was a quick and speedy mend.

The problem: the structure was good, but the batting was totally squashed and the fabric cover was full of wax – making it useless. Without a new one, my clothes would be horribly ironed and covered in wax. Top priority.

The mend: I needed to totally recreate the ironing board fabric cover and cut out new batting. This was wonderfully simple.

I removed the cover by loosening the drawstring. I separated the foam from the fabric (easy as they were just set on top of each other).

I placed the foam on top of the batting and cut.

I placed the waxy fabric on top of a stiff cotton sheet. 100% cotton, linen, or wool is best for an ironing board. These fibers can withstand high temperatures and won’t melt like poly’s or acrylics. My sheet was a remnant from my Orla Dress.

I added 1 inch around the edges of my fabric cover to create the drawstring channel.

After cutting my fabric, I pinned the edges up 1 inch around the new cover.

I sewed around the edge using a 3/4″ seam allowance. I stopped about 1/2″ from where my stitches began to leave room to thread the drawstring through the edges.

Using the old drawstring and a safety pin, I managed to thread the string through the stiff fabric.

Finally I was ready to place the cover on the board, sandwiching the batting. I used the board’s original drawstring stopper to tighten the string.

And then I was completely done! I now have a fresh ironing board cover and no danger of waxing my clothes.

I’ve had beeswax food wraps on my DIY list for about three years. While my friend Carly was visiting, she suggested we get our craft on and make some. I can confidently say it is now crossed off and perhaps will never be reattempted. This is one precarious and messy DIY.

Beeswax fabric food wraps are an alternative to plastic wrap. They’re super popular in the world of zero wasters, homesteaders, and no plastic folks. With an uncommitted foot in all three of these camps, I knew I would use these food wraps proudly, but making them was another story. I have zero experience working with wax, so I think this makes me the perfect candidate to honestly describe the process. Hopefully you can learn from our mistakes and make beeswax wraps with ease.

Materials

Beeswax block

We bought a pound of beeswax from the local candle and soap making outlet (does every city have this?). Most tutorials/recipes recommend pellets, but we choose the block because it was more cost effective. Our 1 lb block was $15 and 8 oz of pellets were $9 = $3 saved in the long run.

Metal Tray

We picked up an tin tray from a thrift store to use as our wax container. Wax is basically impossible to remove from surfaces. So we bought this tray knowingly, devoting it to wax forever more. Tray = $1

Fabric Scraps

We grabbed cotton scraps from my stash. We tried to choose thin fabric. This is better than canvas/ upholstery/ thick cotton. The duck fabric above? Too thick. The best was the pink and white fabric which were similar to bedsheets.

The Process

We melted our beeswax by placing the wax block on the tray in a 170 degree oven. We then waited for it to melt. We waited and waited. Finally after 1 hour, we decided this was too much. We took it out and sacrificed a knife to cut it into smaller pieces. At this point our beeswax was the consistency of butter. Slicing the warm beeswax was much easier than attempting to cut it while it was solid. We put it back in the low heat oven and waited another hour for the beeswax to melt completely

Total melting time: 2 hours

Finally, we were ready to dip our fabric pieces in the beeswax. We had read about a few methods online, and the dip method looked the easiest. It was not. Each time we attempted to dip, our wax cooled too quickly. So we had to place the tray mostly in the oven. But this placement made it difficult for dipping the fabric. We laid a larger fabric piece over the open oven door to catch any wax drips.

The wax already cooling

As we were dipping the fabric we also were unable to coat the areas we were holding. The two corners of a rectangle might remain unwaxed. However, when we attempted to coat those areas by dipping the piece again, we somehow created a double layer of wax that was tricky to remove.

We dried the fabric pieces outside on a basic clothes rack. After dipping most pieces we noticed that the layer of wax was too thick and visible. At this point we were baffled with the complexity of this project. Carly pulled up a video of someone making the fabric wraps with ease. They were using an iron and wax paper. At this point we both would rather end up with usable products than anything else, so we shuffled off to the store and purchased parchment paper ($4)

The New Method

The excess wax removed by iron.

With my iron in hand, we set out to make our thickly coated waxed fabric more practical. We sandwiched the fabric piece between parchment paper and ironed it slowly on the lowest setting. We were able to melt the wax enough so it slowly squeezed off the fabric and onto the paper. At the end of this method we had thinly coated fabric – perfectly usable.

Also because we’re crazy and hate using paper products, while Carly was ironing, I was scraping the excess wax off of pieces of parchment paper so we didn’t have to use two new pieces for every piece of fabric. We probably saved about half a roll of paper? Plus we reclaimed some beeswax, too. I found this task, though repetitive, to be quite relaxing. The one downside with this method happened when my ironing board was waxed in the battle. But, to be honest, it really needed a refresh anyway, so keep a lookout for an ironing board cover tutorial in the future!

Lessons Learned

Pellets, though a few bucks more, would have saved us so much time trying to melt the beeswax

If we really wanted to use the block effectively, we should have bought a cheese grated and dedicated it to grating wax forever more. That would have also saved us some time.

The dipping method was not the best for our space and created thickly coated fabric

The ironing method was much more precise and created thin waxed fabric.

In the end, we now have usable beeswax fabric wraps. They’re very exciting.